I want to build a courses marketplace app. This app will be called Code Capital and have all courses (as of now) by Rafael Quintanilha, the owner of the QuantBrasil YouTube channel https://youtube.com/c/quantbrasil and writer of the Code Capital Substack https://codecapital.substack.com/
This app should work as follows: courses will be sold standalone or in bundle for now. Eventually we may think about a "free pass" subscription, where customers can buy access to all courses for a limited time.
We will list all courses and each course will have their lessons. Lessons can be marked as open (so everyone can watch them, like a preview) or to member-only. Regardless, users might be logged in to watch anything (even if free members). They can buy of course individual courses to watch.
It's important that SEO plays a nice role here. So we want it to be open pages, with the play button being a captive modal or something when users are visitors. This way we can track intent and funnel through clicking to watch a video and actually signing up or eventually buying the course.
Let's leave livestreams out for now. Assume all content is pre-recorded and belong to a course, and can be marked as public or member-only.
As for the technical details, let's go with Cloudflare Stream because of their affordability. I would say it make sense for it to be a monorepo maybe with Next.js app once I am familiar with Next.js. For backend, would be great to stay in Cloudflare ecossystem, so maybe Hono for Workers is best. You can propose any other tech stack if relevant.
Follows attached a prototype made in Replit just with basic ideas on how it should work so you know more or less what I am talking about. Videos can have categories, and now it will be mainly in pt-BR once Rafael, the instructor, is Brazilian. Use it as reference only – but not base any technical decision on it, once it was just for prototyping visually.
For authentication, we can try something like Better Auth or other alternatives if they make sense. But I want a good auth method out-of-the-box, and I think connecting with social like GitHub will be relevant here.
Design in a way that this could be extensible, without complicating too much. For example, I think eventually I would want to create a mobile app for it that can sync with web and users could see their courses on the go, or stream on a big TV. Again, don't make it more complicated than needed and we will start with web only for now.